Reader Elderbear shows off his four virtual desktops that he switches between using previously mentionedYod'm. On each desktop he's running Samurize to embed system and personal info in the desktop, Rainlendar, RocketDock, and AutoHotKey scripts to manage his ImportantStuff.txt file. Let's take a look at each desktop in detail.

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Elderbear writes:

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I dug up this burst of blue Microsoft wallpaper. I pulled it into GIMP and mucked it up six ways from Sunday. It's a psychedelic explosion, or perhaps the entrance to a worm hole or the last sight of a person penetrating the event horizon of a black hole. Who knows. It was fun enough for me to keep it around. I played with the clock quite a bit. The circles weren't perfectly concentric at first, and that bugged me (I'm a little to OCD about some things). So I skewed them and that seemed to fit me much better. When I get time, I'm going to work over my RocketDock icons. Most of them really don't feel right to me, nor seem to blend well with my desktop approach.

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Elderbear writes:

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I love Stonehenge. The original image is from a Microsoft wallpaper. I started out just greening up the grass. Then I got the idea of adding an aurora. I played with the color balance of the aurora photograph (not mine, one I found) to make it glow more intensely (no words or images can describe the experience of a live aurora). I went back through and used a soft brush to color the stars white again. This is the 2nd (#1) image on my Yod'm 3D rotation of desktops. Here I have RocketDock unhiding with the stacks docklet open. It's one of many ways I use to hide too much stuff while keeping it all readily accessible. The Important Stuff list isn't really a to-do list, it's a list of things I want to keep in the forefront of my consciousness for now. Double clicking on the list will open Notepad to edit it, and I have some AHK macros to either open the list in Notepad or to allow a single item to be appended to the end of the list.

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Elderbear says:

This is my 3rd desktop in my Yod'm 3D rotation. I started with a Hubble image of the Sombrero Galaxy—I love astronomy and astrophysics. I played with the color tones and faded the edges to be more compatible with desktop info display. The color tones, a vaguely violet cast to silver, match the Windows theme I'm using. The navigational aid is placed in the lower right on top of a "supernova" effect I added with GIMP. My clock is something I dreamed up with Samurize using pie chart meters. It's innocuous, but I can get a nearly instant idea of about what time of day it is without thinking hard.

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Elderbear says:

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This was once a Microsoft wallpaper. All that remains is the green hill. I used GIMP to replace the sky with something more colorful. This is also the fourth screen (number three) in my Yod'm 3D desktop rotation. I used GIMP to add in the three standing stones as a navigational aid. I like the ability to get basic information at a glance, hence the Rainlendar calendar and to-do items. Also, I use Samurize to keep some basic system performance info on the desktop, as well as a crypto-clock and to manage my important stuff list. In this capture that list is available for editing in Notepad (using an AHK macro). I think I have since reduced the transparency, because this looks cool, but is a pain to use.